For me, water-cooling began out of necessity. I water-cooled my first PC nearly ten years ago, when, living in a house with a flat roof, my bedroom got incredibly hot in the summer months. I was already hooked on overclocking at the time and strove to save money by buying cheap, but very overclockable hardware. Unfortunately, the combination of the house's architecture and high system temperatures meant that my PC was intolerably noisy and unstable.

Infuriated, I made the move to water-cooling - not a particularly easy one as there were few guides and even fewer off-the-shelf components back then, which resulted in regular trips to the local DIY store to search for parts. I initially water-cooled my CPU, and my overheating and noise issues were solved instantly - my PC went from a hot, noisy box to a cool and quiet machine of wonder. I had more overclocking headroom than before too.

Every one of my main rigs since then has also seen me spend entire weekends building and leak-testing. In fact, the last three PCs I've built have had a water-cooled CPU and GPU, as well as the various hotspots on the motherboard too. However, a lot of today's hardware simply doesn't need water-cooling as urgently as its equivalent back in the day. People still want water-cooling, but it seems to be a desire that's separate from the need to actually cool the hardware.